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low, guilty voices. And we think of the souls and we count them—we had known every ghost in the city, and we can recall their names. We marvel at the cruelty of their fate without having the capacity to truly comprehend it—no more than to merely recognize it as grotesque. But, like the mechanical girl, we have no souls, and we are not afraid of the Soul-Smoker, we have no reason to worry that the souls inside him will somehow lure ours away and we will fall dead on the spot, abandoned by our animating essence. We think about the nature of souls and listen to the small domestic noises reaching us from the little house on top of the hill.
    We sit all along the wall like giant gray pigeons, our hands clenched under our sharp chins, our wings folded primly, our eyes narrowed, and our ears pricked up. If someone were to wander by at this wet, ungodly hour, they would believe us turned into stone, inanimate like the wall we grip with our clawed toes. Or they would wonder what the gargoyles are doing out of their caves and hiding places, why are we out and about. But there is nobody here to pry or to wonder, and we watch and we listen and we wait, and we do not know what they are talking about.

Chapter 3

    The next morning, Mattie remembered that she still had to finish Iolanda’s perfume. Fortunately, the night spent talking to the Soul-Smoker taught her more about regret than, she suspected, the entire city could. She found dried wormwood in her extensive apothecary, and prepared to sublimate its essential oil—she lit the burner and cleaned the aludel, and assembled it so that the smaller vessel sitting on top of the larger one was tilted at enough of an angle for the condensing vapor to slide down the concave walls into the waiting receptacle. As the wormwood heated, she crushed the brittle spiny leaves of rosemary, downy-gray, and mixed them with extractants and solvents to pry away its properties of memory.
    One did not regret what one did not remember; Ilmarekh, who remembered every moment, every twinge of hundreds of former inhabitants of the city, told her that. The opium made him talkative last night, and the souls in his possession crowded and pressed, trying so desperately to look out of his blind eyes, struggling so valiantly to move his reluctant, cottony tongue. He spoke in a hundred voices; only one of them was Beresta, but Mattie felt that it would be impolite to ignore the rest of them, and she listened to their laments and reminiscences, to their complaints about children who grew up and never visited, about the sorrow of dark alleys and the cold, wet slither of a robber’s knife.
    Mattie listened, waiting for the small voice of the alchemist woman who could tell her about the gargoyles. But it was so crowded that she only had a chance to utter the name of her son—Sebastian, and the street he lived on. She didn’t say anything else, but it was enough for now. Mattie thought that she would visit Ilmarekh again, perhaps visit him often. He knew so much, and yet no one dared to ask him questions for fear of losing their own souls. He was all Mattie’s, and she was not a woman to miss her chances.
    The warm smell of wormwood filled her laboratory, and she collected the few transparent, pale yellow drops that waited for her in the aludel. She blended them with rosemary and with the sage-and-myrrh concoction she had prepared last night. The musk of ambergris enveloped the rest of the ingredients in its sensual embrace, forcing them all together, the bark of the cypress and the sharp, bitter camphor softened by the gentle herbal scents.
    Satisfied with her work, Mattie nodded to herself and let the mixture settle and blend. She was about to go out for a walk, and maybe pick up a few chemicals she had fancied for a while but had no means to buy until now, when a sharp rapping on the door announced a visitor.
    She opened the door to see Loharri—dressed in a formal frock coat, he seemed especially thin and